One of our most important priorities at the World Future Fund is to try to
make democracy work. We back up this commitment with concrete programs. Our
Global Indicators
Project defines key issues and shows ordinary citizens how they can get
educated and get involved in non-violent, positive actions to work for change.
Our Global Education Project provides
educational material to educate people about other cultures and religions so
that different cultures can find a means to come together and work for needed
goals.

However, the thirteen years we have
spent studying global indicators reveal realities that cannot be avoided.
There is a widening gap between what is
needed to build a sustainable global future and the response of today's global
political world order. This gap illustrates a
disconnect between political policy and global realities that is going to have
very grim consequences if changes do not take place.

The
time needed to implement these changes is running out. It is not
realistic to expect that the gathering storm of global problems will leave the
current political structure of the world intact. Quite the contrary, there is
every reason to believe that
the continued failure of the current system
to deal with global problems will have huge political consequences, as
have all great crises in history. Parliamentary democracy
as we know it could very well self destruct
in our time just as it did in ancient Athens and Rome.

This is why it is important understand the political forces that could emerge
to threaten and potentially supercede democracy in key areas of the world. In
order to understand the future, there is a need to understand the past. We have
looked into the past for wisdom to see into the world political future. What we
have found is very important. We have found that the modern totalitarian
political structures have deep roots in world history - going back into ancient
times. We have found that these roots are based on highly sophisticated
systems of intellectual political theory in both the ancient east and west. We
have also found that democracies' roots in ancient Greece and Rome were far more
fragile than most believe. In
light of all these realities it is only prudent to study the intellectual
foundations and the historical record of totalitarianism.

In almost all periods of great
crisis there is a concentration of political power at the top. Centralized
dictatorial power, however, is not always the same thing as totalitarianism
The exact definition of the term, "totalitarianism", has long been a subject of
endless debates among scholars. We certainly do not pretend to have the
last word here but we have found the following definition useful.
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state tries to control almost
all aspects of society. Totalitarianism tries to create well organized
programs of propaganda to motivate people to support the system and sets up
systems of political persecution to crush those who might resist.
Totalitarianism generally justifies its huge centralization of power at the top
in terms both the alleged severity of threats facing society and alleged utopian
visions of the future that is supposed to be produced by the ruling regime.
Totalitarianism often uses religion to define itself as the manifestation of
supernatural power on earth and very frequently creates a cult of personality
around a supreme leader, who is either presented as a prophet of God or an
actual living god on earth.

Democracy does not take place in a vacuum. Nor is it ordained by divine
right to last forever. It can
only exist when a critical mass
of a nation's citizens agree to assume
responsibility for governing themselves.
It can only exist when government policies are adopted that lay the foundation
for a sustainable future. It is absolutely
essential to study the potential global political implications of today's
unsustainable policies. Our Global Totalitarian Research Project is very
specifically designed to achieve this goal.

ANCIENT ROOTS OF TOTALITARIAN IDEOLOGIES

The term totalitarianism was invented by Mussolini but the
philosophy it represents is actually thousands of years old. The centralization
of political power and control of citizens by an authoritarian state are
political trends that date back to the dawn of history.

In the ancient world, in both the east and the west,
totalitarianism evolved into highly elaborate systems of philosophy, from
Plato's views in the "Republic" to the ideas of Lord Shang in ancient China to
the very detailed plans for totalitarian rule described by Kautilya in ancient
India.

There about 5000 years of recorded history starting with the
creation of the Old Kingdom in Egypt in 3000 B.C.. For almost all those 5000
years authoritarian rule has been the norm of the human condition. The past
can and does relate to the future. This is why it is important to study the
past. Thus, the study of authoritarian rule is not a matter of opinion. It is
a necessity. Indeed, it represents the overwhelming majority of world history.

THE REAWAKENING OF HISTORY: THE SHATTERING OF ILLUSIONS IN
THE 1990'S

In the 1990's a false complacency settled over the world. The
pathetic collapse of one form of modern totalitarianism, communism, led to a lot
of unrealistic illusions about the future. We were living in a "new economy".
World trade would lead to world peace. Somebody even wrote a bestselling book
suggesting that things were so great that history was now "over".
U.S. President
Bill Clinton went to World Com headquarters and hailed the company as the wave
of the future.

Today, World Com has been exposed as the
architect of the biggest corporate fraud in American history. The American
economic bubble has burst. Violence and war again stalk the world. Even
more disturbing is the fact that most of the world's major environmental
indicators continued their downtrend in the 1990's in spite of the short-lived
euphoria on Wall Street and in Washington. Still more problems emerged
in the field of economics. While the 1990's bubble produced a sort of
global upper class, wages remained in sorry shape for all too many people.
American wages remain back where they were in the 1960's. Mexican wages are
actually 50% below where they were in the 1970's, and Brazil's also declined. In many African countries
conditions are actually worse than they were in the 1950's.

On September 11, 2001 a lot of the popular illusions about the
future were reduced to rubble along with the towers of the World Trade Center.
Since then the pace of violence around the world has accelerated. India and
Pakistan nearly had a nuclear war in early 2002. Violence in Israel has reached
record levels. In 2003 American invaded and conquered Iraq. In the Congo three
million people have been slaughtered in the last few years in the bloodiest war
in modern African history. Happy talk from the 1990's about the "democratic
peace" now seems a grim laughing stock.

While a lot of the delusions of the last ten years have largely
been exposed for the utter idiocy that they were, their unhappy consequences
remain. Investors who believed in the fairy tale predictions of the Wall Street
"experts" have lost trillions of dollars of their life savings.

More disturbing has been the neglect of the study of world
intellectual history that took place in the 1990's when it was automatically
assumed that America's systems of politics and economics represented some sort
of final "New World Order". Voltaire once correctly observed that the "Holy
Roman Empire" of his day was neither "holy", "Roman" nor an "empire". Sadly,
the "New World Order" of the 1990's turned out to be neither "new" nor
"orderly". Unlike, the "Holy Roman Empire" which lasted 1000 years, this
"Order" is already falling apart into disorder after a mere few years.
Indeed, it may be that the last ten years have been a "democracy bubble" as much
as a financial "bubble" in the long term reality of history.

Chou en Lai was once asked what he thought of the French
Revolution. It happened so recently he said, that it was too soon to tell.

Unfortunately, there has been little thought given to what might
replace the current system if things keep going downhill. The study of
totalitarianism was largely neglected in the last ten years. Right now there
is no well-organized web site set up for the study of totalitarianism throughout
history. In fact, there is no book on totalitarianism throughout history. We
intend to fill that gap.

LESSONS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD:
THE RISE AND SUICIDE OF DEMOCRACY IN ANCIENT ATHENS AND ROME:

In order to understand where we are, we must look into the
past. Modern western parliamentary democracy did not come into being out of
thin air. It is based on the political systems of ancient Athens and Rome.
The U.S. Senate is named after the Roman Senate. Capitol Hill, where the U.S.
Houses of Congress sit, is named after the Roman Capitoline Hill. Even the
structure of almost all of the official architecture in Washington is based on
Neo-Classical designs.

Obviously, just as Neo-Classical architecture in the modern west
has some differences with the original creations of Greece and Rome, so too
does modern parliamentary democracy have some differences with its original
models. However, the ultimate failure of both these ancient systems contains
lessons that relate to our world order today. In both those societies it ruled
for relatively short periods of time and ended up committing political suicide.
It is a matter of the highest importance that we go back to ancient Greece and
Rome to see if we could be headed for a similar fate. It is equally important
to study the intellectual evolution of ancient Greece and Rome so that we can
see what might emerge in a post-democratic world.

ANCIENT ATHENS

Pericles and his imperialist foreign policies led Athens into
such a national catastrophe that democracy was largely discredited in the
ancient Greek world. None of the great minds of Greece that followed Pericles,
such as Socrates, Aristotle, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plato, saw him any kind of
hero. (Socrates even ridiculed him as a "pastry cook". ) The "cult of
Pericles" is an invention of the modern western world over 2000 years after he
led Athens into ruin and disaster. Furthermore, Athens was never a major world
power like Persia. It was Alexander the Great who made Greece a world power,
and he despised Athenian democracy. (Aristotle was Alexander's
tutor.) Indeed, Athens actually supported Persia
during Alexander's campaign for world empire. The New Testament was written in
Greek. It is an example of how democracy had been consigned to the rubbish heap
of Greek history that the word "democracy" is not even mentioned in the entire
work.

THE HELLENISTIC GREEK WORLD

The empire of Alexander marked the transition of ancient Greece
from the Classical to the Hellenistic era. In this era two giant empires
dominated the Greek world, the Ptolemaic Empire, whose key possession was
ancient Egypt, and the Seleucid Empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean
Sea to the borders of India. The political mentality of this empire can be seen
in some of the quotes we have assembled from
Plato and
Aristotle. These quotes speak for themselves in terms of their totally
anti-democratic point of view.

ANCIENT ROME

Unlike ancient Athens the Roman Republic did become a major
world power. However, this was hardly a happy story. The Roman Republic was
one of the most brutal imperialist regimes ever seen. Most of the "Empire" was
conquered by the Republic. The Roman Republic set up the largest and most
brutal human slave trade ever seen until the Anglo-American slave trade of
modern times.

Unfortunately, military conquest abroad did not bring peace at
home. The huge influx of foreign wealth led to violent class warfare,
culminating in a series of appalling bloody civil wars. After Augustus
established the Empire in 40 B.C., parliamentary democracy had so little
credibility that it largely disappeared for almost 1,700 years as a serious
political force in the west and did not come back into favor until the
eighteenth century.

LESSONS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD:
TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL REVOLUTION IN ANCIENT CHINA

During the third century B.C. there was a global trend in the
ancient world towards totalitarianism. This was particularly evident in China
where the state of Chin (considered the Sparta of ancient China) created the
first Chinese Empire. This state was based on some of the most ruthless
political theories of totalitarian political control that the world has ever
seen, the theory of legalism. Chinese political theory ever since has been a
fusion of Legalism and Confucianism, particularly as developed by Emperor Wu Ti,
the Chinese Emperor whose armies reached all the way to ancient Afghanistan and
opened up the ancient "Silk Road". Legalist texts are not widely available in
English but we do have
a list on our web. We also have the only western copy of the
Book of Lord Shang, the key legalist text. (This text is in Chinese.)

LESSONS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD:
TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL REVOLUTION IN ANCIENT INDIA

Meanwhile, the first major empire in India was being created by
Emperor Chandrgupta I. This is a state that would have truly warmed the heart
of Joseph Stalin or other modern experts on the totalitarian control of
society. The political master plan for this society is outlined in a very
detailed book by Kautilya, the Emperor's Prime Minister called the
Arthashastra. Systems for setting up a secret police and other agencies
familiar to modern tyrannies are discussed in minute detail.

A particularly grim aspect of ancient India was the racial caste
system described in the ancient Book of Manu. It is not an accident that Hitler
and Himmler saw in ancient India a model for their plans for Europe. It is also
not an accident that Arthur de Gobineau, the intellectual founder of modern
racism, used ancient India as the model for his ideas.

THE MODERN REBIRTH OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

Parliamentary democracy was reborn in the late eighteenth
century and nineteenth century in Europe, being based on idealized versions of
ancient Greece and Rome. It almost collapsed in the next century under the
challenges of fascism and communism. Today, the disastrous failure of communism
has created a vacuum which is presently being filled by capitalism and
parliamentary democracy.

The key question is the future of this "new world order".
Will this system self destruct in our time as it did in the ancient world?

THE CRISIS OF MODERN PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

The problems created by our world system today are far more
serious than those faced by ancient Greece and Rome. Neither of these
states created a system that threatens the biological foundations of all life on
the planet. The dimensions of the crisis can be seen in our
World Situation Report and in
Global Indicators Project. Some key specific charts can be seen by
clicking here.
Power can be a double-edged sword. The current "triumph" of parliamentary
democracy could well become its funeral wreath if it cannot reform itself.

The goal of our organization is to try to educate leaders about
how to reform the current system to deal with global problems, which is the key
point of our Indicators
Project. We are particularly interested in encouraging people to make
democracy work as is shown in
our non-partisan, educational guide for citizen action. However, the
magnitude of the current crisis and the dimensions of the political failure to
deal with it over the last 50 years have to be taken into account. It would be
foolish in the extreme to believe that the modern world system rules by some
sort of divine right. In both Greece and Rome the suicide of democracy led to
the rise of authoritarianism. In our time the rules of history will again
assert themselves if the political power structure fails to reform itself. It
is a fantasy to believe that parliamentary democracy will survive if it cannot
deal with global problems. Totalitarianism will not only be imposed from above,
it will be demanded from below.

Today's gathering storm will create a period where essential
concepts of political philosophy will again become open to public debate. Ideas
from the past will be used to control the future. Thus, it is important
to see the whole picture of political philosophy - rather than looking through
the very narrow lens of the post Cold War concept that that history is now
"over" due to the "permanent triumph" of parliamentary democracy.

THE DEADLOCK OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

In the developed nations, ignorance, complacency, apathy and
political gridlock have paralyzed long-term reforms, such as the development of
safe, renewable energy technologies or systems of agriculture that do not
require draining the world’s limited underground water supplies and using of
vast amounts of dangerous chemicals.

Indeed, in America, for example, there are actually popular
political movements that seek to increase gridlock by balkanizing political
power. These movements attack what is an already small American government (by
global standards)
(see chart) and they attempt to turn over national problems to the states
(which currently are in the worst financial shape in modern times..

The longer reform is postponed, the greater the reaction
could be in the opposite direction. Hitler gained power because he promised
to end the gridlock of the Weimar Republic. The huge popularity of people such
as Hitler and Napoleon (as well as Augustus Caesar) shows that the people will
welcome leaders who promise to sweep away democracy in order to deal with
crises.

Failed democracies have been and will be torn down by the
very people they claim to "represent". A silent crisis in today’s
democracies is the growing (and well justified) popular belief that the system
is not working. We urge people, via our
indicators project, to participate in the process, as noted before on
our citizen education page. However, nature will not tolerate a political
vacuum. If reform cannot come inside the current political system, the system
itself will collapse and be replaced by a more authoritarian system.

DEMOCRACY AND TERRORISM

The availability of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists
presents yet another critical challenge to today's democracies. The
proliferation of WMDs will now enable private sector groups to unleash levels of
mass murder and devastation that previously were only the domain of major world
powers. This "privatization" of mass murder is one truly "new" idea of the
"New World Order". It seems to be connected to "faith-based" initiatives
such as the attack on America on September 11 or the various suicide bombings in
places like Israel or Sri Lanka. . All this is going to fuel still further
the demand for state power. For example, a biological terror attack could spark
an epidemic that could kill millions. The very threat would be a justification
for the most severe forms of social control.

THE NEED FOR CENTRALIZATION

Finding solutions to today’s daunting global environmental and
social problems will require a massive centralization of power. This is hardly
a unique observation. Crises have always required such solutions. Global
environmental problems require an even higher level of centralized power and
international cooperation than ever before due to their nature.

The key question is the manner in which government power
is going to be concentrated. Will it be done in an orderly, humane and
responsible manner? Or could we replay such events as the Holocaust, Stalin's
Gulag Archipelago or Mao's "Great Leap Forward", which we now know killed over
40 million Chinese citizens under appalling circumstances? We have already had
recent holocausts such as the mass murder of one million people in Rwanda and
the mayhem in that took place in the former Yugoslavia as democracy unleashed
the forces of racism and violence that had been kept in check by the
dictatorship of Tito.

RELIGION AND TOTALITARIANISM IN TODAY'S WORLD

It has been said that there are no atheists in the trenches
during a war.In our time the growing awareness of the seriousness of the
world situation has led to a veritable boom in religion. Unfortunately, the
neglect of religion in the first 50 years of the last century has led to levels
of religious ignorance that are being dangerously exploited by various forces
claiming to be "fundamentalist". Such forces have great appeal. Most people
want to do the right thing. The idea of coming closer to God and God's power by
means of religious purity is a noble cause but a cause that can end up being
manipulated by malevolent or insane forces.

A very likely event is the fusion of totalitarianism with
religion. In the study of Nazi Germany too little attention has been paid to
the religious aspects of the regime. Hitler himself defined Nazism as a
religion. The exact details of this new religion were kept deliberately
ambiguous in certain areas so as not to offend powerful church interests in
Germany. However, on a number of points Hitler was very specific. He openly
proclaimed himself to be an agent of God on earth. The views of Luther, Pope
Innocent III and others were used to justify the persecution of the Jews. Himmler went much farther, laying the groundwork for the total replacement of
Christianity by a new form of German paganism.

What is needed is education about religion. It is crucial
that people understand what the real "fundamentals" about their faith are. It
is also crucial that they correctly understand other faiths so that religious
conflicts do not tear our planet apart. This is why we have created our
global
education project. Unfortunately, the coverage of religion in the western
mass media can only be considered a total disaster. Few things are more
troubling than the abuse of the term "fundamentalist". In reality, many key
"fundamentalist" factions in world religious politics today are anything but
"fundamentalist". A key part of the American "religious" right is made of the
Assemblies of God, a denomination that did even exist until the twentieth
century and was until recently denounced as a bunch of heretics by more
established conservative religious groups like the Baptists. In Islam, the
Shiites of Iran have long been regarded as heretics by Islamic conservatives.

To understand religion and politics it is necessary to
understand theology and history. Furthermore, in the non-western world it is
very important to be able to read foreign languages since many radical movements
deliberately tone down their messages for the foreign, English language
audiences.

A key part of our study is to educate people who might be
vulnerable to the message of destructive religious forces so they can understand
the realities of their own faith and its history. In our interviews with many
radical religious young people around the world, we have been shocked by their
truly appalling ignorance of their own religious history as well as the
tendency to believe in a lot of totally nonexistent "facts" in their history.
Sadly, this is just as true in the "free" west as in the world of Islam.

Technology has no morality. It is only a means to an
end. As the "dot coms" continue to disappear into oblivion along with
the life savings of those who saw them as the "New Economy", there hopefully
will be one positive aspect of this tragedy, an end to mindless faith in
technology as an inevitable force of good. It's hard to believe that some
"experts" had even predicted that the "dot coms" would actually replace the
governments of the world!

Technology will increase the hypnotic power of charismatic
leaders and will also enable levels of political control virtually unprecedented
in history.There is a lot of truth to Albert Speer's observation that a
key difference of Hitler's regime to those of the past was the role of
technology. Indeed, Hitler was the ultimate "high tech",
"multimedia" politician. TV was first used in the 1936 Nazi Olympics.
Without the invention of the loudspeaker, mass rallies like Nuremburg would have
been impossible. Not since Augustus Caesar had there been such a total
orchestration of technology, media, art and music for political purposes.

People such as Hitler have very magnetic personalities. In our time, with television and 24-hour video and audio on demand
(even for
computers not on broadband) they will be able to emotionally connect to millions
of people in a manner unprecedented in history.

Today, the internet and global TV enable the communication of
ideas on a scale never before seen in history. The internet, in particular,
will enable ideas to be communicated on a scale beyond human imagination in the
past. This means that a small, well organized group will be able to
expand at a far faster pace than before. A giant political upheaval could take
place far faster, particularly in light of both public apathy and low public
confidence in the status quo.

Too many Americans have had the comforting thought that
totalitarianism can only come to power by force and only stays in power by
force. In reality, world politics is much more fluid situation. Failed
democracies have been and will be torn down by the very people they claim to
"represent". Hitler was without a doubt the most popular leader of all time
inside his own country, and he came to power in free elections. Stalin's show
trials were immensely popular among many Russians. The three largest free
elections of all time were won by the BJP Party in India, a radical nationalist
organization that has plunged south Asia into a thermonuclear arms race.

What is particularly disturbing is that all around the world
radical groups are gaining power. In Palestine opinion polls show huge public
support for the suicide bombers. In key European nations far right politicians
are gaining power. In Japan, the most prominent nationalist leader is now
Governor of Tokyo and recently won reelection in a landslide.

On September 11, 2001 a lot of the popular illusions about the
future were reduced to rubble along with the towers of the World Trade Center.
Since then the pace of violence around the world has accelerated. India and
Pakistan nearly had a nuclear war in early 2002. Violence in Israel has reached
record levels. In 2003 American invaded and conquered Iraq. Three million
people have been slaughtered in the Congo in the last few years. Happy talk
from the 1990's about the "democratic peace" now seems a grim laughing stock.

CONCLUSION

Democracy does not just "happen". Nor is it ordained by
divine right. It can only take place where a significant critical mass of a
nation's people is willing to take the time to serve as citizens to govern
themselves. The purpose of our
Indicators Project is to provide nonpartisan educational information to show
people how to participate in democracy. We urge all the people of the world to try to
participate in a nonviolent constructive manner in their democracies.

However, we face problems far greater than those of ancient
Athens and ancient Rome. The failure of their political systems should serve
as a warning to us. History is a dynamic process. It is not static. Today, we
enjoy the benefits of global environmental policies that have borrowed from the
future and are not sustainable in terms of even the most elemental analysis of
relevant data. Thus, it would not only be naive but very irresponsible to
assume that today's major democracies are going to make adequate preparations
for the future, particularly in the realm of environmental policy. It is
only prudent to plan ahead for alternative scenarios.

We do believe we can play a vital role in bringing vital
documentary information about political philosophy to the world. In this way,
we can use the wisdom of the past to understand the future and hopefully make it
a better place.

Our goal is to use the power of the internet to educate people
around the world about the theory and practice of totalitarianism, from ancient
times to the present.

Our web site is to serve as a portal to educate people,
particularly leaders. The information on our site is organized for busy people
who have little time. These are the people who can have an impact on
making policies here in the United States and abroad.

The internet is also a means to offer a free university to all
who want to learn, all around the world. We want to provide an online resource
for educators and scholars. The web site can benefit professional teachers, as
our lists offer a ready-made foundation for courses on totalitarianism.

Under no circumstances do we plan to engage in any kind
of partisan politics, supporting or attacking any political party and so
on. However, we do plan to monitor political developments in key countries and
publish relevant news and documentary material about what is going. We also
want to study these countries in order to make sure that we are placing
historical and documentary material on the web that relates to current events.

An absolutely essential part of our plan is a global
view of history – not a “west is best” or “west only” view. This means
giving careful attention to a global view of world political philosophy, giving
serious attention to doctrines such as the Legalist school of ancient Chinese
political philosophy.

In the long run we want to make the site multilingual so
that it can reach a wider audience. We are aiming at the major nations of
the world. The following languages are chosen for export: German, Japanese,
Chinese, Arabic and Spanish. Since the cost of translating everything into
different languages would be very high, some priorities will be set that relate
to the particular language involved. We have already researched and linked to
the best automatic translation web sites. However, these translations, while a
giant step forward, have severe limitations in terms of accuracy. Fortunately,
technology is moving forward and things are likely to get better.

Our Totalitarianism Research Project has several major
components:

A Guide to Historical Texts on the Internet

We link to an extensive list of web sites, making the World
Future Fund a central point from which the study of totalitarianism can be
conducted. This enables us to make a wide range of historical documentation
available to our readers without duplicating the work of others. In
addition, acting as a focal point of study also allows us to concentrate out
efforts on areas of research that others have neglected.

Our effort to consolidate the study of totalitarianism in one
place is of particular benefit to readers in developing nations. Researchers in
these countries frequently only have access to obsolete computers and low-speed
Internet connections. Our comprehensive lists of links provide a single point
of departure for their research. Moreover, we post documents and lists of
relevant links using very few graphics, allowing these readers to search our
collections more efficiently.

The World Future Fund is unique in that its centralized approach
to Internet research provides a comprehensive list of links.

Many historical sources are still not available on the net.
Also, some sources are simply too long to read online. In these cases we have
created targeted reading lists. Our lists recommend both primary material and
significant secondary works to which researchers can refer. These materials can
easily be used as the basis for courses, as well as for individual study.

We also show, by means of a series of quotations and analytical
works, the violently anti-democratic nature of ancient philosophers such as
Plato and Aristotle, who advocated concepts of eugenics and euthanasia in the
most specific terms.

Part of our project involves producing reports on important
research subjects. Thus far, these reports have focused largely on Nazi
Germany. We intend to produce reports on other subjects as well, however,
including Stalin’s speeches, a report on the legal theories of totalitarian
justice as defined by Stalin’s chief prosecutor.

We already have created some truly important and unique
reports.

Currently, we have posted on our web site the most detailed report on
Hitler’s plans for the conquest and colonization of Eastern Europe and the
Western Soviet Union:
General Plan East.

We have also prepared the
only online guide to the Nuremberg Party Congresses . These gatherings
were held annually in the 1930s after Hitler came to power. They present a
fascinating study in the use of mass meetings, technology, architecture, and
political fanfare as expressions of the totalitarian mentality and tools of
totalitarian control. In addition, they offer a single example of the
organization of the Nazi State, since the most important institutions of the
Nazi Party, army, and bureaucracy were represented.

In addition, we have prepared a brief report on the unbelievable deficiency that currently exists in the
availability of Adolf Hitler’s most important speeches. We have found that the
sources scholars currently rely upon for many of Hitler's key statements are a)
badly translated, b) often incomplete, and/or c) prepared with no understanding
of the context within which the speech was given.

Lastly, we have created the most extensive list of Heinrich Himmler’s
speeches and secondary sources on the ideology of the SS:
Himmler and SS Documentary List. Our list includes the archival
locations of these documents in the Washington, DC area, which makes study of
this subject significantly easier.

Guides to Key National Archives

We produce detailed guides to the study of certain subjects and nations.
We have compiled a detailed list with internet links for the main national
archives of the world. We presently have the best
Guide to German Archives that is available on the web.
Scholars of modern German history need only visit our page for a list of the
most significant collections of documents in Germany. Our attention in this
guide is directed primarily at institutions in Berlin (archives and libraries),
which is once again the focal point of German political and scholarly activity.

We are in the process of creating similar guides for Tokyo and Beijing, as
well as for other cities.

Sources in Original Languages

A major part of our plans is the translation of key
material so that people all over the world can more clearly understand
each others' culture. If possible, the Fund will create mirror sites in
the world's main languages. We plan to monitor technology closely here.
We make information available via
translation web sites and software. This software
allows people to
use Windows XP to write in foreign scripts, like Japanese and Chinese.
We also monitor scanning software for turning older intellectual works
into digital form. For example, we shall try to monitor software for
scanning in the old prewar Gothic German print fonts and Japanese and
Chinese characters.

We are very committed to the idea of the internet as a means of
education for the people of the less-developed world.We deliberately do not use frames on our web and keep graphics to a
minimum so that people in the developing world who do not have the money
for high speed internet access will be able to read our site.
Almost all of our site is designed to be accessible at a speed of 28K.
This is particularly important since the speed of access slows down as
viewers get farther away or are in countries that do not have modern
telecommunications networks. Via the internet the world's poor will
be able to get access to libraries that they could not hope to reach
otherwise.

Education and Outreach.

A very important part of our plans is to reach out to major research and
educational institutions around the world to encourage serious research in areas
that need attention. In our work we periodically discover subjects of
considerable importance that have not yet been the focus of serious scholarly
study. In some cases we encourage research organizations and institutions with
related interests to work on these subjects.

Similarly, we plan to alert prominent scholars to subjects that are in need
of study, and we plan alert publishers about the need to either republish
important out-of-print books, or to publish significant works for the first
time.

We believe that public interest organizations should not waste money
duplicating each others work. Networking with like-minded organizations and
institutions reduces the possibility that our work duplicates the work of
others, just as it ensures that we do not work in isolation.

By means of educating other organizations we can greatly increase the impact
of our work.